Comments You Won’t Find in Ron Paul’s Newsletters

The Paulistas are fighting back over the issue of Ron Paul’s racist newsletters with their favorite rhetorical contortion. They claim that Paul shouldn’t be held to account for the wacky material in his publications because he didn’t write them and was unaware of their content.

Paul defended the newsletters during his South Texas Congressional campaigns in the 90’s. His audience then didn’t seem too concerned so he was comfortable standing by the material. It won’t be so easy to disavow the newsletters now.

A simple mental exercise might illustrate why the content of the newsletters and Paul’s decades-long delay in renouncing them are a reflection of his character. Imagine for a moment what would have happened if one of the following statements had appeared in a rough draft of the Ron Paul Freedom Report:

– Karl Marx had a lot of great ideas.

– Americans are way too attached to their guns.

– Hillary Clinton…I’d totally hit that.

– US treasury bonds, what a great investment!

– Abortion isn’t a big deal.

– Why do people give Israel such a hard time?

– My soul won’t rest until they find the guy who killed Tupac.

– Homeschooling is weird.

– There’s nothing special about gold.

– The South had it coming.

– The Constitution is completely outdated.

– What this country really needs is a politically independent banking and currency regulator.

You can bet your 2nd Amendment rights that any ‘ghostwriter’ who tried to slide one of those statements into a Ron Paul newsletter would be locked out of the mimeograph room faster than you can say ‘Bilderberg.’ Whatever it’s editorial style, The Ron Paul Freedom Report was not Wikipedia.

Would he have allowed articles to be published in his name that glorified Stalin or recommended that the US give California back to Mexico? Does anyone seriously believe that he would have shrugged off such inflammatory comments by simply saying they were written by someone else?

Paul’s proto-blog provides a candid look at who he surrounded himself with, what wacky ideas interest him, and what sort of creepy ideological swamp fed his rise. The reason he is distancing himself now from Neo-Confederate rhetoric that gave him no hesitation fifteen years ago is simple – he had more freedom to be himself when he was a ‘90’s fringe character far from the media eye.

If only he could enjoy such liberating obscurity again.

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James McMurtry’s Too Long in the Wasteland could have been written specifically for Paul:

I hadn’t intended
To bend the rules

But whiskey don’t make liars
It just makes fools

I didn’t mean to say it
But I meant what I said

Too long in the wasteland
Too long in the wasteland
Musta gone to my head